From the Pen of the President: August 2026
- NASW-IL Staff
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
NASW-Illinois Chapter President LaTasha Roberson-Guifarro, MSW, LCSW
There are changes that arrive loudly and quickly through legislation, court decisions, and headlines. How those changes settle into people’s lives can be quieter and more subtle, with their full impact becoming clearer in the days and months that follow.
We are seeing that across Illinois.
August began with the launch of Illinois’ new Families Receiving Emergency Support for Hunger (FRESH) program, an emergency response designed to provide some relief to Illinoisans losing food assistance under new federal SNAP work requirements. Eligible Illinoisans can receive a one time $400 benefit through the program, providing an important temporary bridge for people experiencing the immediate impact of lost or reduced food assistance. Approximately 150,000 Illinoisans were expected to lose food assistance as the new requirements took effect. FRESH provides some relief, but temporary assistance does not resolve an ongoing need. Families need sustainable access to food, and the conditions that made FRESH necessary remind us that longer term solutions are still needed.
For social workers, those 150,000 represent lives, families, and very real decisions about what can wait and what cannot. They are the parent stretching groceries until Friday, the person wondering which bill can wait, or the case manager or clinician searching for a resource that still has capacity. Food insecurity rarely arrives alone. It intersects with housing, health, employment, mental health, family stability, and nearly every system our profession touches.
At the same time, as we help people navigate these changes, our profession is experiencing its own. Beginning July 1, federal student loan limits changed for social work students after social work was excluded from the Department of Education’s professional degree category. NASW continues to challenge the impact of that decision and is currently asking social workers affected by the new student loan law to share their experiences. There is purpose in telling those stories because policy rarely captures the full weight of its consequences. We have to give voice to what changes like these mean for students deciding whether they can afford this profession, social workers already carrying debt, and communities that need more of us entering and remaining in the workforce.
Data tells us scale. Policy tells us what changed. Stories tell us what the change did.
There are more opportunities emerging for us to connect those stories, ideas, and experiences. Effective June 1, 2026, the NASW-Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri Chapters came together under unified executive leadership, with executive director Joel L. Rubin serving across all three chapters while each state maintains its own leadership council and voice. I believe we have an opportunity to seize what this new configuration makes possible. More thought partnership. More sharing of resources and ideas. More opportunities to recognize a community or professional need and bring our collective insight, power, and creativity to it. We become stronger when we have more social workers activated, connected, and contributing what they know.
July also marked a new chapter in NASW-Illinois Chapter leadership, with our new leadership council officially beginning its term on July 1st. Over the past month, NASW-IL Executive Director Joel Rubin and I have had the opportunity to connect individually with our leadership council members. I am incredibly encouraged by this mighty group of social workers and the energy, ideas, and experiences they bring.
Over these past few months, I have had the privilege of watching that same spirit take shape across Illinois. I have seen social workers look at the conditions around them and decide to create something different. Some are starting practices. Others are introducing new modalities of support, building organizations, forming partnerships, or developing services because they saw a need that deserved a response. That is social work ingenuity. We assess, we listen, we question, and sometimes we build the thing that does not yet exist.
What are you seeing that needs to exist? What knowledge are you carrying that another social worker could use? Where could your experience strengthen someone else’s idea? What community or professional need might benefit from several of us thinking about it together? Knowledge becomes more powerful when it moves. Share what you are seeing. Bring an idea into your district. Connect with one of our committees. Tell NASW National what a federal policy change actually looks like in your practice. Reach across disciplines or regions to someone whose work intersects with yours.
One place to put that collective energy to work this fall is the 2026 NASW Chapters Virtual Conference: Strength in Action: How We Uplift, Defend, & Transform, taking place October 28 and 29 with the NASW-Illinois, Missouri, and Nevada Chapters. Social workers will gather across state lines for learning, dialogue, connection, and up to eight CEUs across areas including ethics, clinical supervision, cultural competency, implicit bias, suicide prevention, and Alzheimer’s disease. I love the evolution from Uplift, Defend, Transform to Strength in Action because action gives our values somewhere to go.
So this month, consider where your knowledge can travel further and who might need to hear it. Join a conversation already underway or start one that needs to happen. And please, keep talking to me. I have loved hearing from so many of you over these last few months, learning what you are seeing, what you are building, what concerns you, and where you believe we can do more. Keep it coming. Every conversation reminds me how much knowledge, creativity, and possibility lives within this profession. When we connect more of it, we expand what is possible for each other and for the communities we serve. I am excited to see what we activate together.
LaTasha Roberson-Guifarro, LCSW, currently serves as vice president and chief operating officer at Lutheran Child & Family Services of Illinois, one of the state’s largest child welfare and adoption agencies, and where she also acts as privacy officer. In this role, she leads programming, data and information systems, and enterprise-wide initiatives that strengthen performance, expand impact, and drive outcomes. Recognized as a trusted voice in the field, LaTasha’s leadership extends nationally and statewide. She is a Council on Accreditation (COA) reviewer, co-chair of the Child Welfare Advisory Committee for Innovation, Technology, and Stakeholder Engagement (CWAC-ITASC), board member of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR), vice chair of the Illinois Child Welfare Licensure Board, and president of the NASW-Illinois Chapter. She also serves on multiple advisory boards and committees dedicated to system transformation, child and family well-being, workforce stability, equity in race and LGBTQIA+ care, social justice, and innovation.
